The Moron Magnet

Science and science education will take a giant step forward this Memorial Day when a 50,000-square-foot magnet for morons is activated in rural Petersburg, Kentucky, just over the state line from Cincinnati, Ohio. (If you follow the link, be sure to scroll down from the white space — some curious formatting at the site.)

The builders of this moron magnet, officially called the Creation Museum, expect the facility will generate a field of intellectual vacuity strong enough to attract some 250,000 ninnies, flakes and feebs in its first year of operation. They may be right. After all, the nonprofit ministry Answers in Genesis managed to attract $27 million in moron monies (aka, private donations) to build the facility, which will boast a huge replica of Noah’s Ark and animatronic displays showing Adam and Eve mingling with dinosaurs.

This moron magnet, like a smaller facility due to be activated in Florida, operates on the principle that there are plenty of people who are determined to swindle themselves and their children out of an education, and will travel great distances to pay upwards of two sawbucks each to be fed a comforting pablum of lies and superstition.

Science educators around the country are denouncing the moron magnet, as well they should, but I think we should also recognize the great public service being performed here by Answers in Genesis. Anyone who willingly goes out in public wearing swag from the Creation Museum gift shop is telling the world he is a gullible rube ripe to be taken advantage of by any con artist with a good line in Gospel patter. Any educator who tries to book a field trip to the Creation Museum is warning parents and administrators that he is a conniving fraud and a potential source of expensive litigation. Any church that sends its kids to the Creation Museum is notifying the community that it is a spawning pool for Christianist nonsense, and apt to engage in other forms of political and/or social mischief.

So by all means, let the Creation Museum fling open its doors. If the morons get to waste money on their own make-believe museums, they’ll have that much less time and energy to spend on trying to infiltrate places where real science is respected and taught.